And don’t touch anything with bare hands. Use leather gloves, preferably rubbed in manure to get rid of human scent.
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Reporting in over here and it’s crazy. Since stopping the flax a week ago and stomping down tunnels, for the last couple days I see no action. No rats, no active tunneling. What? Could it be?
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We have a rat issue. Currently, only one horse is getting feed. It is alfalfa pellets with renew gold. He eats it well so I do not think there is much of a food source. However, they have tunneled under mats. I am going to try the Terad3 and was wondering if anyone put feed, peanut butter etc in the bait boxes to encourage them to enter? Or do they just go in to get the poison.
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Well fed barn cats are the best rodent control
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Summer of 2020 I had a rat infestation that was over the top. I had had some, and my cats got a few, and my traps got a few and I thought i had a handle on it but that spring I had meat chickens who are messy and eat a lot and the food was probably just more plentiful than the rats could resist.
I has not wanted to poison and couldn’t bring myself to drown them but the day I moved a board in a spare stall and 7-8 or them fled in broad daylight, I knew my cats and I were not keeping up.
There is a poison called Just One Bite that is a second or 3rd generation and it is has very low toxicity to anything eating a poisoned rat - the veterinary poison control vet told me that if my cat ate the biggest rat he could find and the rat had eaten more poison than necessary my cat would still be totally fine. Just One BIte also takes a few days to work so they will take up a lot of it before dying so they don’t learn not to eat it.
Downside? I had dead rats EVERYWHERE. And trying to be a good, responsible rat killer i put them all in a trash can so nothing could find/eat too many. It was July. Take my word for it when I tell you do not put 25 dead rats in a trash can in July and wait for a week for garbage day.
They also died in the subfloor of my barn which meant even after trash day came and went I had dead rats stinking up the place for a month.
But I have not had rats since.
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I just saw that and wondered about it. Did you put it in a poison container?
I agree with this statement generally. (And I 100% agree that barn cats should be well fed.)
The problem is, lots of barn cats will not go after rats. Healthy adult rats are big. So once you have a rat population it is hard to get rid of with just cats.
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I used the repeater trap last year and it worked great. It was definitely difficult for me to drown them, but I just kept reminding myself that when we used snap traps they would eat the caught rat before we could empty the trap, so they were pretty vicious! The most I caught in one night was 9, the neighbors caught 27 one night. The rats also seemed to move on after about a week of trapping.
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It worked for me. I have a neighbor, about 1500’ away, as the crow flies, that breeds rats - all her feed is just sitting in open bags in the barn. I had rats move in, first to the duck coop, then after I relocated the ducks to my sister’s, the barn.
I tried several types of traps and poison with no luck, although they had tunnels everywhere and I could hear them in the walls. One drowned in a water bucket, and I accidentally killed one at night check one night when I moved an empty trough he was hiding under, and gave him a TBI. He seized then died.
Once I figured out they were eating the whole flax out of the manure, and changed to ground flax, they left in short order. No sign of rats since 2020. If they are around, they are just passing through.
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It really is amazing. I have no tunnels now - no sightings.
That is awful you have a neighbor breeding rats? Why would anyone do such a thing?
I doubt it is on purpose.
I once lived next to someone who we joked bred rats. Small tiny lot, close together. Separated by a chain link fence. When we wrongly thought we could enjoy feeding birds we could stand at our kitchen window and watch an endless stream of rats coming from his junk/garbage filled yard, thru the fence and eating our bird food. Obviously we very quickly took down our feeder.
I think our dogs are what kept them mainly on their side of the fence.
Edit to add bad typing.
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This. In this case they are just lazy/cheap/overwhelmed?
They just go to the poison. I usually try to check weekly and the bait is either partially eaten or all gone. Good luck!
Well, as luck would have it, a rather large rat snake is hanging out in the barn. I have not seen a rat since. I’ll wait and get the poison in the fall!
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Mice did $1600 worth of damage to ours but we don’t have any animals as we don’t live there yet so I surrounded the tractor with apple flavored mice/rat poison and it worked well last year. However if I had barn kitties I would not use it.
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There are rat breeders. They are sold as pets. Maybe that could be another revenue stream for barns.
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This is why I’m tempted to go get a herd a Jack Russels. My beagle mix just watches them and barks occasionally.
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A friend asked me to take the little bas—ds over to his barn to have a clear out. The place was covered in spilt feed, and the rats were living in the walls and roof. Asked him if he wanted his barn torn down and left. I did have a problem with the dogs going under the car and destroying wiring when hunting rats. Prevented the rats enjoying the engine heat by hanging a bag containing a peppermint oil soaked cloth under the hood.
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Be prepared with protection and weapons 'cos you end up being the referee 
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